JFrog Nets $50M for DevOps Investment

Investors gave software distribution platform provider JFrog $50 million in a Series C funding round today. Company officials at the Netanya, Israel-based provider said they will hire more people, invest in technology and expand globally to meet the "growing demand" for their DevOps and software automation platform.

“The software world is tired of domain dictators and demands a universal powerful solution that supports all technologies and software packages,” Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog, said in a statement. “DevOps and developer teams deserve more. They demand a multi-package, highly available and secured end-to-end solution."

Beyond Docker Registry

"It’s how the world’s biggest organizations choose to host, manage and distribute their software," he said.

Haim added companies build their continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines on the JFrog platform, which automates end-to-end software delivery from developers to consumers and devices.

New investors Scale Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Qumra Capital participated in this funding round. Haim called it one of the largest VC investments for the DevOps market.

“This investment will allow us," he said, "to ... push our products to a new level, with a user journey 10x better than Docker, Amazon or other single technology solutions. We are the binary people; it’s either one or zero. No half-baked solution is good enough for our community and customers. With enough capital secured, we will continue to provide them with class A, enterprise level products and services.”

JFrog claims more than 1,500 paying customers including seven of the top 10 financial services companies, seven of the top 10 telcos, and eight of the top 10 internet and software companies.

Making the Leap

JFrog provides a binary repository solution and a software distribution platform on the cloud. Its promise: provide the technology that positions itself between developers and DevOps to help them store and manage binary code to provide control over the software release process.

“JFrog is at the epicenter of the merger between dev and ops teams,” Andy Vitus, partner at JFrog investor Scale Venture Partners, said.

“JFrog is automating a large number of processes that previously were tedious, prone to introducing bugs in production code, and highly insecure. As we spoke to our portfolio companies, we found that a large number of them were adopting JFrog’s products. Across the board, from our early-stage companies to those preparing to go public, the engineers running operations were citing JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Bintray as core parts of their infrastructure.”

JFrog officials said “release fast or die” has become the mantra for many organizations as "mobile, cloud computing and social media technologies drive transformation in every industry."

DevOps to the Rescue

The need for a strong DevOps process is supported by industry numbers. The International Data Corporation (IDC) last February released a report (fee charged) that found unplanned application downtime costs the Fortune 1000 from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion every year.

Two-thirds of those surveyed expect DevOps to improve customer experience, according to the IDC. DevOps is expected to accelerate improved productivity, higher profits and improved IT employee satisfaction to the customer by an average of 15 to 20 percent. Companies plan to implement as part of DevOps include automation (60 percent), continuous delivery (50 percent), continuous integration (43 percent), automated testing (43 percent), and application monitoring/management (43 percent).

Gartner last year reported it expects the total for DevOps tools would reach $2.3 billion by the end of 2015, up 21.1 percent from $1.9 billion in 2014. "By 2016," Gartner researchers reported, "DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25 percent of Global 2000 organizations."

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